Skip to main content

Wednesday -- a review

"Satre said, 'Hell is other people.' He was my first crush."

-- Wednesday Addams.

Back when I heard they were making a TV series out of the Addams Family character Wednesday for Netflix, I really didn’t have much faith that it would be very good. And when I read what the basic plot would be: that Wednesday would be sent to a special school of the dark and wicked, I figured this was going to be much worse than I had initially thought. The Addams Family had been around for decades; it didn’t need to be “modernized” with a bastardized format that merged it with Harry Potter (and I’m really sick and tired of the frigging “magical school for kids” plot that has seemingly overtaken nearly every movie and TV show within the last twenty years).

But when I finally saw Wednesday, you know what? It didn’t suck. In fact, the new Wednesday show on Netflix is really very good. What the heck happened? It’s several things. The first is that Wednesday is being portrayed by Jenna Ortega, who’s a marvelous young actress with a great screen presence. Her Wednesday is still very much the stern, deadpan little creep whom we know and love from the Addams Family films and TV shows. Ortega plays her with just the right balance of contempt for her fellow students, with a dash of sympathy that prevents her from being an all-out monster.

There’s also the superb writing in this series. The writers smartly realize who they’re dealing with, here. Wednesday might be taken aback on the first day at her new school, but this is still Wednesday, who gives as good (even worse!) as she gets, and who takes no prisoners while doing it. Forget any associations to Harry Potter, because even in a school with vampires and other things that go bump in the night, Wednesday is still a formidable force of her own who stalks along her own path--and to hell with anybody who gets in her way. The fact that the writers “get” Wednesday so well, and right out of the gate--from the very first scene of the first episode--is what makes this series so much fun to watch.

And having Tim Burton direct the first half of the season is also another reason why I love this show. His usual gloomy and creepy aesthetic is a such perfect fit with the Addams Family that I’m surprised that Burton hasn’t worked within this franchise sooner. Recasting Wednesday as a teen sleuth from one of those dipshit CW shows should have been a really bad idea. But by maintaining Wednesday’s true, darkly caustic self, this also becomes a wickedly funny take-down on those very same Nancy Drew-type series. I’m eagerly looking forward to another sleuthing adventure with Wednesday and her right-hand hand, Thing. --SF

The first season of Wednesday is only available on Netflix for now.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jack Reacher Never Go Back -- a Review

I was first introduced to Jack Reacher through the Tom Cruise movie of the same name that was released back in 2012. I liked the movie well enough, despite a few nitpicks here and there--but I really enjoyed reading the novels by Lee Child. Jack Reacher was a former US Army officer who retires and becomes a drifter, roaming from state to state in the country that he fought so hard to protect. And Reacher is still protecting us, taking on a variety of villains, from backwoods mobsters to big-city terrorists from book to book. The stories in the books are well-told, with great attention paid to the smallest of details. I think of them as 1980s action films, only without being insulting to your intelligence. What a perfect series to adapt to movies, right? Well, Tom Cruise looks nothing like how Jack Reacher is described in the books. And while I thought the first Jack Reacher film was good, the second, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back , is very badly flawed. Based on the JR novel of the sa...
Post a Comment
Read more

3 Body Problem

3 Body Problem , Netflix’s latest TV series, is loosely based on the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, by Chinese author Liu Cixin (who also wrote the book The Wandering Earth ). Simply put, it’s an alien invasion story, but one that’s a lot more sophisticated than your average ‘pew-pew-pew’ cliché-fest. For one thing, this series begins in the 1960s, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which was the nationwide purge instigated within China by then-Chairman Mao to keep himself in power. A young woman named Ye Wenjie arises from the chaos to become a central figure in the overall story. The 3 Body Problem of this series’ name refers to a far-flung solar system that has three suns. Any planet within this tri-sun system would have a hard time of it, taking turns orbiting one belligerent sun after another, and it just so happens that the aliens who set their eyes on invading Earth--known as the San-Ti--come from this embattled world. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Holdovers -- a review

It’s always a joy to watch someone who’s a master at their work, whether it’s a musician, an artist, or an actor. Most great actors make it look easy--which is not to say that I think acting is an easy job. I know from personal experience that acting is very hard. It’s a skill that the talented make look very easy, and one of the most talented actors working today is Paul Giamatti. If you’ve watched some movies over the past few years, chances are very good that you’ve already seen Paul Giamatti. He was the jittery earthquake expert in San Andreas , the sympathetic police chief in The Illusionist , and as the titular John Adams (a part that got him the Emmy and a Golden Globe) in the 2008 HBO series of the same name. Recently, I saw Paul Giamatti in the superb The Holdovers , a movie that I wasn’t planning on writing up, but I kept thinking about it--and all of its characters--long after I saw it. In The Holdovers , Giamatti plays Paul H...
Post a Comment
Read more